`BONE PEOPLE`: INCOMPLETE LIVES IN A UNIQUE SPOT

Reviewed by Jay McInerney, The author of two novels, ``Bright Lights, Big City`` and ``RansomCHICAGO TRIBUNE

The Bone People

By Keri Hulme

LSU Press, 445 pages, $17.95

Keri Hulme`s ''The Bone People'' comes to us from New Zealand with a publishing history almost as convoluted as the narrative itself. Turned down by the large presses in New Zealand, it was ultimately published by a collective formed especially for that purpose and went on to win three major literary awards in that country, most recently the Booker Prize, awarded annually to the best novel by a British Commonwealth author and published in the United Kingdom.

It is published in this country by Louisiana State University Press, which brought out John Kennedy Toole`s ''Confederacy of Dunces'' years after that book had been turned down by the major New York houses, and after Toole had killed himself.

''The Bone People'' is a shaggy monster of a novel, a conglomerate of primitive and sophisticated narrative techniques, of skepticism and mysticism, of European and tribal perspectives. Like her heroine, Kerewin Holmes, Keri Hulme is part Maori, and the novel draws on the myths and lore of these original inhabitants of New Zealand.

Kerewin Holmes is a painter and a hermit, a young woman who by virtue of a financial windfall, presumably a lottery, is able to indulge her misanthropy to the point of building a stone tower on an ocean peninsula. ''No people invited, for what could they know of the secrets that crept and chilled and chuckled in the marrow of her bones.'' (The frustrated artist-in-the-tower-motif, the frequent semi-stream-of-consciousness passages and the indulgence of portmanteau words like ''windark'' and ''soulwringing'' suggest the undigested influence of Joyce`s ''Ulysses.'') Kerewin sees her exile from the human race, partly a function of bitter family disputes, as a heroic stance, and tells herself that she is self-fulfilled. But by the time the novel opens her artistic inspiration has dried up, and a portion of her cynicism is directed at herself. She is looking for a way out of her isolation.

The Joshua who ultimately brings down the walls of her town is a ''sullen urchin'' named Simon Gillayley who sneaks into her tower one day. The boy is mute. When Kerewin finally locates his adoptive father, Joe, she learns that Simon is an orphan, the only survivor of a shipwreck, and that Joe`s wife died several years after Simon was adopted. Simon is an irascible child, and there is no medical explanation for his lack of speech, but it is clear that he loves Joe, and increasingly, he tries to attach himself to Kerewin. Grudgingly, Kerewin begins to let these two needy males claim a place in her life.

Almost from the beginning, Kerewin`s curmudgeonliness and her suspicion of human entanglements seem transparent in masking her own needs, but her negative assesment of the species is justified just at the point when her defenses are beginning to break down. Simon appears at her door one day badly beaten, and when she tends to his wounds she uncovers a history of abuse in the horryfying scars all over his body. With no help from Simon, who is oddly protective of his adoptive father, she discovers that Joe has been beating Simon for years.

Keri Hulme is unflinching in her exploration of the causes and effects of child abuse, and the reader may find himself almost rebelling against her sense of the complexity of the relationship between abusive parent and abused child. She refuses to simply condemn the father. Hulme plots a difficult course between the half-conscious complicity of the community, including Kerewin, in Simon`s plight, and the outraged cry for retribution after the problem comes to a crisis.

The fact that Kerewin finds most difficult to accept, after Joe has nearly killed Simon, is that the father and son still love and need each other. She also finds that she needs them.

Joe`s atonement, after several months in jail, involves a suicide attempt and a rediscovery of his Maori heritage. One of the achievments of ''The Bone People'' is the way in which Maori myth and culture are unobtrusively incorporated into the story and come to seem inextricable from the New Zealand landscape.

The resolution of the novel is somewhat abrupt, especially in light of the meandering, almost glacial pace of the main narrative, and leaves some of the central mysteries of the plot unresolved. Kerewin`s reconciliation with her family takes place offstage, and Simon`s strange past is never fully brought to light. The story of the intertwining of these damaged lives is incomplete, but the fictional world of ''The Bone People'' is overall an intriguing place to visit, and there are singular pleasures and powerful insights along the way.